Don't Let Fear Stop You

I’ve spent a lot of my life living in fear. Fear that others will find out that I’m a fraud. Fear that I’ll look foolish or uncool for being really in to a thing. It’s stopped me from progressing down a path and in the way that I really wanted to. For a long. Damn. Time.

It’s felt vulnerable to me to believe I could actually live out some of my bigger dreams and ideas. Perhaps a mix of 1) what it would mean if I failed and/or 2) some holdover conditioning of how “uncool” it is to try hard / care deeply. Getting over that is learned. And not easy.

— Justin Mezzell (🥃,🦉) (@JustinMezzell) September 7, 2022

This tweet came through my feed today. It resonated. Like a lot. It sums up precisely how I’ve felt. Even though I had no idea at the time.

A lot of the things I’m doing and experiencing now are in opposition of that fear. Screw you for getting in the way of me being who I am much sooner!

I wish I could go back and live more authentically at a younger age. At the same time I think I needed to live that life to come to this exact realization. I suspect that mid-life is kind of where realizations like this happen. I think there is a term for that …